Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Everything Is a Learning Experience

Greetings, gold fans! I can't help but feel I've left you in the cold again. A few weeks ago, I announced my new project for the new year...then promptly proceeded to post absolutely nothing further about it. I do apologize most sincerely for that. It wasn't right to just go silent, especially after disappearing for most of December.

So what happened? Well, some of you who follow me on Twitter may have gotten bits and pieces, but let's start from the beginning. My guild's raid nights were cancelled from December 24th through about January 7th. No real surprise there. There was Christmas, then people were on vacation, etc.

It was when I poked my head back onto my main server on January 9th, what should have been our next scheduled raid night, that things went in unexpected directions. It turned out that, seemingly out of the blue, our raid leader/guild master was quitting the game. He just felt the game wasn't really doing anything for him, he had other things to do with his time, etc.

Now, I don't have a problem with anyone deciding to quit. It's a game, after all. However, when you've been raiding with a group for almost three years, and most of them consider you a friend as well, it seems a bit rude to give no warning until the day you're leaving. Doubly so if you're in a leadership position.

But that's neither here nor there. The bigger concern was that there were 2 or 3 RL friends of his that were likely to go with him. Now, that may not sound like much to some, but we're a 10-man group, and our server was inactive enough that we'd often have trouble getting a stand-in when one or two people were absent. Four people would be unthinkable.

To be honest, I thought our raid team was doomed. The one thing I didn't want to do was start all over with another group. If I couldn't keep raiding with them, would I quit raiding? If I quit raiding, would I quit the game? I have my gold making, but even with this blog going, I mostly consider it a side project. I couldn't imagine quitting, but I couldn't imagine losing my raid group, either.

Thankfully, the remaining members of our group pulled together in a way I wouldn't have expected. Basically, we all got together and said "Well, I guess that means it's time for that server transfer we've been talking about, so we can start recruiting." And just like that, within a couple hours, we were all moved over. Of course, we had to wait for the guild itself to follow. Apparently, in order to server transfer a guild, you need to have been the GM for at least 7 days. Who knew?

The new server is treating us well, but as it happens, the new server is Zul'jin, the very same place where I had been engaging in my "from scratch" project. At that point, the temptation to mix those gold pools was too much to maintain the integrity of the project. Thus, it ended much quicker than I thought it would. However, it was still a valuable learning experience, and I gleaned a fair amount of knowledge to share with you all.

Hopefully, I'll be posting more regularly now, but with classes getting back into full swing, we'll see. If nothing else, feel free to poke me on Twitter if I go a week without posting. Sometimes I'm not really busy, per se, just too distracted to notice how long it's been.